「華人戴明學院」是戴明哲學的學習共同體 ，致力於淵博型智識系統的研究、推廣和運用。
The purpose of this blog is to advance the ideas and ideals of W. Edwards Deming.

2009年3月15日 星期日

走進大千世界 憑新意創業 By Rebecca Knight

Out to see the world and take a new approach

By Rebecca Knight 2009-03-16

Though she would never say so, Linda Mason is a modern wonder woman.

A mother of three, Ms Mason has had a varied career as a relief worker, author, consultant, and entrepreneur – she is the co-founder of Bright Horizons, which operates more than 600 workplace childcare centres round the world.

She credits her professional success to the values instilled in her at the Yale School of Management. “There was a culture of risk-taking at SOM,” she says. “The tone there was that with energy, talent, and hard work, you could make anything happen.”

Ms Mason admits she was not a likely candidate for business school. She grew up in rural New York: her father was a doctor who made house calls, and her mother was the town mayor. After college – she majored in art history, and minored in piano at Cornell – she moved to Paris to study French. “Unlike kids today who are so directed after college, I wasn't,” she admits, laughing. “I was out to see the world.”

As a student at the Sorbonne, Ms Mason became interested in humanitarian work, but knew that finding a job in the field would be difficult without relevant qualifications. So she began looking into management programmes in the US.

Then, Yale's business school had only been in operation for a couple years. But she was drawn to its focus on the non-profit sector. Ms Mason remembers her years at SOM as, “stimulating and thought-provoking”. “It was a community of people with similar values,” she says.

She and fellow students had lengthy “conversations about doing things differently and better”. “We were interested in using business as a tool for good. There was nothing called corporate social responsibility at that point. But there was discussion about how companies needed to be more responsive to the needs of communities, more accountable to the environment. At that time, these were brand new ideas.”

Ms Mason graduated from Yale in 1980. Then, thousands of Cambodians were crossing the border into Thailand to seek asylum from Khmer Rouge, the communist ruling party. “I was very drawn to the crisis,” she says.

With the support of the SOM's dean at that time – William Donaldson, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission – with two classmates she travelled to the region to research and write case studies for Yale. Care, the international relief organisation took them on as unpaid interns, and assigned Ms Mason to run a feeding programme for malnourished children in refugee camps along the Thai border.

Ms Mason put into practice what she learned at SOM, and ran her feeding programme like a business. She conducted a needs assessment to determine how big the programme ought to be. She carefully monitored the warehouse for problems. And when the programme was in operation, she weighed and measured children every day and kept vigilant track of illnesses.

“We needed to show donors that their money was well invested. Our return was a reduction in malnourished children,” she says.

Based on her experience, she and classmate Roger Brown – who later became Ms Mason's husband – wrote a book, Rice, Rivalry and Politics, which analysed the relief operation in Cambodia. They also developed a course for SOM on relief management.

Ms Mason returned to the US and took a job in New York working for Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultancy. “It was an enormous culture shock,” she says. “I would go into midtown Manhattan in a suit and heels, when I had been wearing jeans and sandals. I was doing more conceptual work, rather than working directly with people.”

Consulting was intellectually rewarding, but not as satisfying as working in the field. After a year and half, she needed a change. “I realised: I've made a lot of money, I've logged a lot of air miles, but have I made any real difference?”

So she and Mr Brown ventured to the Sudan as directors of Save the Children's emergency programme there. The programme served 400,000 famine and war victims. “That's the beauty of youth. We didn't spend any time thinking about whether we were qualified; we were idealistic. SOM had given us the courage.”

When she returned to the US the second time, she had no clear idea of what to do next. She and Mr Brown wanted to continue to work together, but to start something of their own.

“We didn't know what to do, but one thing we were sure of was that we didn't want to do something just because it would look good on our resumé. We wanted to something that would inspire us.”

It was the mid-1980s. There had been a rapid increase in the number of mothers of small children in the workplace. “It was the biggest sociological event of our lifetime. You couldn't help opening a newspaper without reading about the shortage of quality childcare. And most of the existing care was of poor to mediocre quality,” she says. “Unencumbered by knowledge or experience, we said: let's change the way our country looks at childcare.”

Their concept was this: to try to help corporate employers retain workers by offering on-site, high-quality childcare. Under this model, employers subsidised care, usually by providing space. The cost savings allowed Bright Horizons to pay higher wages and thus retain employees.

Ms Mason and Mr Brown spent two months researching and wrote up a business plan.

Because venture capital firms were looking to diversify out of high-tech and into services, they easily raised a first round of financing, worth $2m. Bright Horizons was launched in 1986

Companies, however, were not initially receptive, and it took five years before they made a profit.

Today, the business, which employs 18,000 people, has annual sales of $774m, growing at around 11 per cent a year.

The company went public in 1997, and in 2008 it was acquired by Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm, for $1.3bn.

Ms Mason, who remains a non-executive chair of Bright Horizons, is also the author of The Working Mother's Guide to Life, a parenting advice book.